Saturday, September 30, 2006

Brad Goldberg, General Manager of Microsoft’s Windows Client Business Group, would, no doubt, prefer not to be called a horse.

But Goldberg did say on September 29 that Microsoft has “one more EDW” (External Developer Workstation) build of Vista slated before the product RTMs (releases to manufacturing). That means one more fairly widescale test release. Then it's soup, Goldberg said.

In 1998 two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded Google.com, a search engine that uses a better technology than had previously existed for indexing and retrieving information from the immense miscellany of the World Wide Web and for ranking the Web sites that contain this information according to their relevance to particular queries based on the number of links from the rest of the Internet to a given item.

Friday, September 29, 2006

Okay, now Sony is really in trouble, if Scott Prather is shorting his bet on PlayStation 3. Read the full post...

I am not sure I would take a $.07 bet on this one because things have surprised me before in this space. What I would take a $.07 on is that Nintendo gains market share, Microsoft stays the same and Sony is the big loser. MS might be the big surprise just because I think they are the only ones focused on the next gen of gaming (look at the stuff they are doing with Peter "he is the king" Jackson).

[Skype chief executive and co-founder Niklas Zennstrom] said: "We have no publicly available products yet to offer and I can't give you a timetable."

"When we begun developing the mobile phone version we didn't realize the number of technical obstacles. It is challenging and is taking much longer than expected," he added in an interview with the daily.

Okay, so maybe not $15B for Myspace, and perhaps Facebook should sell sooner rather than later...

The rise of these social-networking sites is another sign of the shifting tastes on the Internet, as niche audiences flock to new alternatives to MySpace and Facebook. That potentially spells trouble for those two incumbents, as fickle online audiences can increasingly divide their time between more sites. Indeed, the social-networking space already has shown itself to be vulnerable to the latest fad. Four years ago, Friendster pioneered social networking but was quickly overtaken by rivals as it suffered from technical problems. The new sites -- and their investors -- could benefit if young people similarly get tired of MySpace and Facebook and start to drift away.

The whole point of Zune is to stay in the game and to position Microsoft for future success. Remember, it takes Microsoft three tries to get almost anything right, so maybe this time they are actually counting on that. But if Zune is an eventual financial success for Redmond, it won't be through hardware OR music sales, but probably through location-based marketing.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

The scope of competition in the enterprise collaboration/content server/services market continues to expand... See the full press release for details.

Microsoft Corp. today is launching the public beta of Forefront Security for SharePoint® (http://www.microsoft.com/forefront). This latest release of Microsoft® Forefront security products for businesses is based on Antigen for SharePoint Server, the multi-engine security solution acquired by Microsoft as part of the acquisition of Sybari Software Inc. in 2005.

Looks like the prices are in the same zone as Apple devices and music purchases, and as Real (or Yahoo! Music Unlimited with the "to-go"/non-PC device option) for the subscription option (see the full press release for pricing details along with a long list of options etc.); that tells me Microsoft is pretty confident it won't have to compete by being the low-price/loss-leader disruptor.

Microsoft Corp. is putting the social into digital music, starting this holiday. Today the company announced that the Zune™ digital media player and online service will be available to consumers in the U.S. on Nov. 14, 2006, just in time for the holidays. The Zune device will retail for $249.99 U.S. (ERP) and will create new ways for entertainment fans to connect and share media experiences device-to-device through the use of wireless technology and new software scenarios.

Pragmatech is the worldwide leader in improving Sales Effectiveness through personalized communications. Find out how Pragmatech solutions can fundamentally transform the effectiveness of your Sales & Marketing teams.

The accusations against Apple were led by French legislators who promote “interoperability” in music –- they feel that music should not legally be sold if it is compatible with only one product. Legislators from several European countries are seeking to stop the sale of Apple-exclusive iTunes and promote music and videos that can be enjoyed on any digital device.

Of course, Europeans aren’t the only ones angered by Apple’s monopoly; many in the United States feel strongly about the universal exchange of music, and for the past two years, the European Commission has investigated inflated prices of iTunes in the United Kingdom.

Shares of Red Hat Inc., the largest distributor of the open source Linux operating system, plummeted Wednesday, as disappointing second-quarter results, including a slowdown in billings, triggered analyst and investor alarm.

MySpace, the social-networking Web site, could be worth around $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of parent company News Corp., a Wall Street media analyst forecast Wednesday.

The original Slingbox — the set-top device from Sling Media that pipes programs from your home television across the Internet to your computer screen — is getting some siblings. The company announced three new versions this week, each intended for a different technological need of the television-obsessed public.

Sign of the times -- $299 for all of The New Yorker content since 1925, along with a handy 80-gigabyte carrying case...

If E. B. White and Joseph Mitchell had known that their essays would end up on metal platters spinning at 5,400 r.p.m., they would probably have asked for a bit more per word. Their writing — along with articles by hundreds of other contributors to The New Yorker — is now collected on one 3-by-5-inch portable hard drive.

We fixed the top 20 customer issues/bugs to smooth out some early rough edges.

Writer now has its own space on Windows Live Gallery where a bunch of 3rd party extensions are available (with more to come). Highlights include “Blog This” extensions for both IE and Firefox as well as a Flickr plugin.

Wind power may still have an image as something of a plaything of environmentalists more concerned with clean energy than saving money. But it is quickly emerging as a serious alternative not just in affluent areas of the world but in fast-growing countries like India and China that are avidly seeking new energy sources. And leading the charge here in west-central India and elsewhere is an unlikely champion, Suzlon Energy, a homegrown Indian company.

The company, of New York, said it expects to reach its goal of passing six million homes with a new fiber-optic network by the end of the year. Verizon expects to have signed up 500,000 broadband-Internet customers on its fiber-optic network and 100,000 TV customers by the end of the third quarter, on track to meet year-end targets of 750,000 and 175,000, respectively.

Verizon estimated the network upgrade will take a net investment of $18 billion through 2010 and predicted the project will generate positive operating income beginning in 2009.

First came the hard-learned lesson that e-mail can be used as evidence in legal proceedings. Now blogs -- basically, continuous public Internet journals -- are emerging as fair game in civil disputes, criminal cases, and government investigations, where they are used as evidence with growing frequency.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Of course, this won't do you much good if your new Apple laptop, like Dave Winer's, won't run without rebooting every 10 minutes...

According to the airline's Web site, travelers may use their Dell and Apple notebooks "once the laptop serial number has been checked by a member of the cabin crew." If the unit is not on the recall list, the owner may use it without restriction.

I guess WPF/E didn't make it in time... Read the full post for more Wallop details.

Wallop's approach is unique from the MySpaces of the world, and this uniqueness is both compelling and disconcerting. Uniqueness numero uno is Microsoft, which is a Wallop financial and technology backer. Wallop licenses technology developed by Microsoft Research, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary.

Another uniqueness is Flash. Unlike the plethora of HTML-based social networks, Wallop uses Adobe's Flash to create fluidity, motion and, well, neatness. Wallop sites (hereafter referred to as Wallops) are refreshingly clean compared to the garish pages socialites post on some other social networking services. Individual Wallops are cleanly laid out, with content above the fold (or scroll). The approach allows for much cleaner navigation than some other social networking sites, where too much important stuff (how about "friends") is accessible only by scrolling the browser window.

AOL and a group of entertainment entrepreneurs who created a venture to produce and distribute live concerts on the Internet and elsewhere have dissolved their partnership after just 14 months, executives in the venture said yesterday.

The move to unwind the venture, which was called Network Live, came as its co-founder and chief executive, Kevin Wall, announced that he had struck a new deal to produce live events to be distributed through Microsoft’s online service and, potentially, through products like Xbox. The venture with Microsoft will be called Control Room, he said.

With this agreement in place, MSN and Control Room will embark upon a deep, exclusive content collaboration, combining Control Room’s expertise in creating and delivering live music events for cross-media distribution with the feature-rich video programming of MSN and its global reach and branded entertainment appeal to advertisers. Further, through this agreement, Microsoft Corp. may stream Control Room shows to other platforms, including Xbox Live®, MSN Messenger, Microsoft® Windows Media® Player and Windows® XP Media Center Edition.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Are you ready for laptop storage with no moving parts to spin up, break, drain your battery, add weight, or make noise? That's what you get with Samsung's new 32GB (Solid State Drive (SSD). Built using NAND flash memory, the SSD is the first consumer unit with enough capacity to compete against standard notebook drives; 32GB may not satisfy multimedia addicts, but it's plenty for average business users.

``By the end of 2008, people will install software on their smart drive, and not on their hard drive," said Kate Purnal, chief executive of U3 LLC in Redwood City, Calif., which markets one of the new smart drives.

If the new technology catches on, companies would have greater flexibility in assigning computers to employees.

Each machine could contain only an operating system, such as Windows software. All other programs would be loaded onto a smart drive, which the worker would keep at all times and use on any computer in the office.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Just in case you didn't already know this, Windows Vista is shipping with four tiers of user interface experience, from the new Aero Glass to Vista Standard, Vista Basic and Windows Classic. The istartedsomething blog has 28 screenshots that compare the four different interfaces.

... and speaking of Kubi Software, its home page says "KubiSoftware.com is offline. Please check back again soon", and there's a Joomla! logo prominently displayed. Joomla! says it is "one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications." What's going down guys? Kubi Software

If you’ve got an Xbox 360, did you know that you can hook up your Windows Live Space with your Xbox Live account? We’ve got a number of modules that actually pull information in real-time from your console and display it on your space. You can add your GamerCard so everyone can see your GamerScore and Reputation, and the Last Played Games module shows the world which hi-def Xbox 360 games you’ve been spending your time with. There are also Xbox 360 Themes to give your Space that complete Xbox look.

If you spend a lot of time on the go and are looking for a way to keep up to date with all the latest news and information, then NewsGator Go! is just what you are looking for. NewsGator Go! gives you the ability to track and manage all your RSS content on your Windows Mobile device. Best of all, when you read something on your mobile device or clip an article from your mobile device that action is then synchronized with all NewsGator products.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

But fans and analysts were united in the view that the PS3, despite the superiority of its technology, has failed to demonstrate its “wow” factor.

It will be an expensive, complicated machine, and must make early gains before Christmas to win over the Japanese market, where it will be sold for 50,000 yen (£226). Britain will not get any PS3s until March.

I only had time to skim this, but it looked like an interesting review...

It’s a Malthusian problem. The amount of printed material increases exponentially, but the time available for reading remains static or, in many cases, decreases arithmetically. So once we have decided what to read, the question then becomes, How to read? And the paradoxical answer is, Much more slowly.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

The earlier decision required Google to stop displaying summaries of French- and German-language articles from Belgian newspapers. Google faces a fine of 500,000 euros ($640,000) for every day it fails to comply with the order to publish the decision. It said it planned to fight the order, issued Friday, as part of a broader argument, set for November, in which it will seek to overturn the initial ruling.

“We will now further appeal this measure because we believe it is disproportionate and unnecessary, given the extensive publicity the case has received already, especially while its substance has yet to be debated in court,” Google said in a statement.

Interesting historical recap -- but I think this paradoxical press-bashing by someone in the press conveniently ignores some realities: Apple was essentially dead a decade ago, and the picture was very stark even after Steve Jobs returned (see, e.g., the August, 1997 MacWorld keynote).

Many of the modus operandi that got Apple c1996 into such deep trouble are being repeated today. I don't think we've seen the last Apple roller coaster ride.

Nowadays, Apple is a media darling. The critics like the company’s direction, and so does Wall Street.

But it wasn’t always so. This summer marked the tenth anniversary of Apple’s lowest point–a time in 1996 when the company’s profits and products were hitting bottom. (Steve Jobs’s return to the company he founded was still a year away.)

Here's the thing. Back in the bad old days a decade ago, when Microsoft was busy integrating Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) into Windows solely to harm the competition, one could easily make the case for anticompetitive behavior. There's room for debate about whether features such as Web browsers and IM applications need to be bundled and deeply integrated into an OS. Today, however, few could argue that improving the security of Windows is anything but a good idea. In fact, one might describe such changes as mandatory.

To woo Mr. Zuckerberg, Yahoo has offered about $900 million for Facebook and says it will keep the company somewhat independent, with Mr. Zuckerberg in charge. This has been its model with other acquisitions like Flickr, a photo-sharing site, and Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service that lets members share lists of their favorite Web sites.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Um, isn't it sort of weird to have the company with a quasi-monopoly in electronic documents and a company that enjoys participating in a tight oligopoly in anti-virus software making this sort of complaint?

Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., has told regulators that Microsoft should be prohibited from building free competing software for reading and creating electronic documents into the operating system, called Vista, according to people familiar with the situation.

Meanwhile, officials from antivirus-software maker Symantec Corp. plan to travel to Brussels next week to brief journalists about Vista features that the Cupertino, Calif., company has told EU regulators will undercut rival computer-security-software makers. The briefings are intended to combat a similar public-relations effort by Microsoft, said a Symantec spokesman, Cris Paden.

One popular use of social-networking site Facebook.com is to flirt with other members. As it happens, Facebook Inc., the start-up company behind the Web site, has been doing some serious flirting of its own.

People familiar with the matter say the company has held separate acquisition talks with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Viacom Inc. over the past year. Now, say some of these people, the start-up is in serious discussions -- again -- to sell itself to Yahoo for an amount that could approach $1 billion.

This just in from the wishful-thinking zone: SAP thinks DBMS is going away...

Do you see a scenario where you wouldn't need a database under SAP applications?

[Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group and a member of SAP's executive board:] Long term.

How long? Five years? Ten years?

I don't want to speculate on that. We'll tell you when we're there. There is speculation, but I don't think we need to speculate on that. For the traditional transactional application right now you need a database. Down the road, you're right … But today? No.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

With the release of Windows Vista RC1, the product teams are eager to hear what you think. Visit the Windows Vista Scenario Voting site to explore Windows Vista and let the teams know about your experience. For RC1 users, we have created a special voting category called "Is Windows Vista Ready?" Here you can provide your satisfaction on nine overall attributes of Windows Vista. You can also vote on the same nine attributes for Windows XP to compare and contrast between the two.

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a new program that makes delivering your Pro Merchant Program and WebStore orders a snap. You send your new and used products to us, and we'll store them. As orders are placed, we'll pick, pack and ship them to your customers from our network of fulfillment centers.

NewsGator Desktop Sync Beta is the evolution of the MIX06 demo and offers full synchronization between the Windows RSS Platform and NewsGator Online. Desktop Sync is a system tray application that keeps your feeds, folders and read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform. This means that any application that uses the Windows RSS Platform will be automatically synchronized with your NewsGator Online account

Nielsen/Netratings released their search share numbers for August today, and there's AOL blood all over it. Year over year, 20% fewer search queries have been made on the portal formerly known as relevant.AOL lost .8% search share July to August, sliding from from 6.3% to 5.5%, and are still ranked 4th.

Sales of new licenses for database software increased 15 percent, to $576 million. Oracle executives said much of that came from increased sales of add-on products for Oracle’s core database software.

Sales of application software, which includes, for example, programs for automating human resources processes and managing inventory, grew 80 percent. Mr. Stimson said that much of the growth was from acquisitions, and that it would take several quarters before a direct comparison would be possible.

The deal is notable because Mr. Gore has been an early and visible adviser to the top executives of Google, another Internet powerhouse. Indeed, Google has provided content for regular features on Current’s television network that offer peeks into people’s Internet searches.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Motorola Inc. has agreed to acquire Symbol Technologies Inc. for $15 a share in cash, in a deal valued at about $3.9 billion, the wireless-technology companies said.

[...]

With the deal, Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola gains a company well established in mobile-data computing and radio-frequency identification, or RFID, technology. Symbol also is known for its role in spearheading the development of barcode-scanning technology.

So far, the public details of the Warner-YouTube arrangement – how much songs can be altered, how much ad revenue will be shared – are slim to none. But Rafat Ali from paidContent picked up on an interesting detail in a Forbes story on the topic:

“[M]usic industry executives say that YouTube has offered other labels an option for an equity stake in the company as part of proposed deals.”

Forbes writer Peter Kafka notes that if Warner has taken a chunk of YouTube, other labels face an expensive precedent in their potential dealings with the startup. Universal, of course, will drive a hard bargain, with its publicly voiced attitude that YouTube and MySpace “owe us tens of millions of dollars.”

The legal action is the most recent example of the news media’s challenging the growing power of Internet news portals run by the large search engines. Increasingly, people are obtaining their news in bite-size nuggets on search engines, and advertising revenue for newspapers is diminishing as a result.

[...]

Google News benefits publishers, Mr. Collins said, by making it easier for people to find their content and driving large numbers of users to their Web sites.

“It is important to remember that we never show more than the headlines and a few snippets of text,” he said. “If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspapers’ Web site.”

Priced at $99, the Mix Max is set to hit stores in late October, say Disney officials. The device has a 2.5-inch color screen and comes with enough memory to hold six hours of video or about 240 songs. Disney hopes to court kids and parents by keeping the price well below what it would cost to buy a video iPod.

While it is possible to download music and videos from sites such as Yahoo and Napster onto the device, Disney also will sell in stores its own movies on postage-stamp-sized memory cards that can be inserted in the Mix Max. The company hopes that eliminating the need to download will appeal to parents.

YouTube's new system, announced yesterday and set for release in the next few months, is an ambitious effort to give media companies more control over the video on the site and to address their fears that others will profit from consumers' piracy of their content. The first entertainment company to embrace the system is Warner Music Group. The two companies have agreed that Warner Music will post its catalog of music videos on YouTube and collect an unspecified percentage of the revenue from advertising appearing alongside them. The deal doesn't cover live performances captured on video cameras or other devices, because Warner doesn't own the copyrights to those recordings.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Hmm -- that won't be an ~infinite amount if I'm using a USB flash drive for Windows Vista swap space...

USB flash memory drives are experiencing an increase in product failures as a result of quality-control problems, and the wildly popular replacements for floppy disks could be facing other problems related to fragmentation, according to industry experts.

Recent Gartner Inc. numbers indicate that 88.2 million USB flash drives were shipped in 2005, and 115.7 million will be shipped in 2006. While these portable nonvolatile storage units don't last forever, single-level cell NAND flash drives are commonly acknowledged to last for an average of 100,000 read-write cycles, which is an infinite amount for most users.

Call it a sign of the times, but what is arguably the longest running elite high-tech conference became a thing of the past. Technolgy guru Esther Dyson has quietly put out the word that the 2006 PC Forum, held in March in Carlsbad, California, would be the last.

What is it about youtube.com that has made it so successful so quickly ? Is it the amazing quality of user generated content ? Is it a broadband fueled obsession with watching short videos ?No & No.

[...]

Take away all the copyrighted material and you take away most of Youtube's traffic. Youtube turns into a hosting company with a limited video portal. Like any number of competitors out there that decided to follow copyright law

Video site YouTube Inc. plans to announce today an agreement to share revenue with Warner Music Group Corp. for online advertising that appears alongside Warner Music's own videos and consumer-created content that incorporates its music.

It may be hard to believe if you still think of Flight Simulator as a slow, complicated and hypertechnical "game" that appeals mainly to aviation buffs.

But Microsoft has revamped the software to make it more realistic and showcase the new graphics capabilities of Windows Vista.

I wouldn't be surprised if Flight Simulator X — and future games built on its realistic model of Earth — become killer applications that convince millions of people that it's worth upgrading to a Vista PC.

RealNetworks Inc. today plans to announce a deal with SanDisk Corp. to sell a digital music device that's specifically designed to work with RealNetworks' online music service, Rhapsody. The move follows one made by Microsoft Corp., which will release a digital music player of its own design this holiday season that will be closely coupled with its own online music service. Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. is working on a similar plan.

Westwood-based MicroOptical Corp. (www.microopticalcorp.com) today is disclosing plans to release a version of its Myvu personal media viewer for the iPod. The viewer, which you wear like eyeglasses, resembles Geordi LaForge's thin wraparound frames in ``Star Trek: The Next Generation." You can look over and under the frames fairly easily, so you don't miss a friend passing you by, for example. But I wouldn't try driving with these things.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

However, the report into the habits of iPod users reveals that 83% of iPod owners do not buy digital music regularly. The minority, 17%, buy and download music, usually single tracks, at least once per month.

On average, the study reports, only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites.

And how many different devices will consumers be willing to stack beneath the TV? ``There are only so many $300 or $400 devices consumers want to purchase for their living room," says Jeremy Allaire, chief executive of Brightcove, a service that helps media companies generate revenue with their video libraries.

``You've got a TV set, a DVD player, and a game console, and then you've got a free box from the cable or satellite company. I think the market for a wireless media bridge, which is what Apple's iTV is, is still somewhat limited. It needs to be part of some other device before it gets to the 50 million-viewer threshold."

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Mr. Lapinski said MySpace’s initial popularity came not from word-of-mouth, as is often assumed, but from an intense e-mail campaign. From there, Mr. Lapinski details the already well-known, drama-fraught deal to sell Intermix to News Corporation last year. He describes the current MySpace as more of a marketing tool than a social-networking site.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, contends the wildly popular Web sites YouTube and MySpace are violating copyright laws by allowing users to post music videos and other content involving Universal artists.

[...]

Universal's talks with YouTube Inc. have deteriorated and the recording giant is set to file a copyright infringement lawsuit against the video-sharing company if no agreement is reached by the end of the month, according to a person familiar with the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the confidential nature of the negotiations.

Over the past five decades, hard drives have come a long way. Travel through time with us as we chronicle 50 milestones in hard-drive development--from product firsts to new technologies, and everything in between.

Craig McCaw is spending a lot of his time these days building Clearwire, the Kirkland wireless Internet company that has attracted more than $1 billion in capital this year. But McCaw's Eagle River Investment has found a new opportunity in Utah. McCaw's firm just led an $11.5 million investment in S5 Wireless, a 3-year-old startup that has developed a low-cost computer chip that can identify the location of pets, the elderly, vehicles, laptops, containers and other items without using global positioning systems or radio frequency identification.

Boardwalktech is tackling the “collaborative” spreadsheet problem where multiple people need to work on the same set of Excel data at the same time while continuing to work in isolation on their desktops. Using a combination of a plug-in for Excel and a patent-pending “tabular” database built on top of SQL Server called the Boardwalk Enterprise Spreadsheet (BES), users can easily specify a range (or multiple ranges) of data that gets dynamically linked between Excel and the database.

For Microsoft, this is about more than just a competitor to the iPod, said Mark Anderson, an independent technology analyst. "They're trying to create a new platform and they're a platform company," he said.

[...]

Microsoft's financial investment in Zune is considerable, and it's not something top executives expect to pay off immediately.

In July, Robbie Bach, president of the company's entertainment and devices division, told financial analysts that the company would spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years on the media player. That investment pales in comparison with the billions Microsoft spent entering the video-game console business with its Xbox product line.

While the army of silent people wearing white iPod earbuds may indicate otherwise, Microsoft is declaring that a portable music player can be a decidedly social experience.

[...]

The Zune will be able to play video files and songs in the MP3 format, along with music and video bought through a new service called Zune Marketplace. That service will also have a subscription plan, though Microsoft executives declined to give pricing details. The device will not play content bought from the iTunes Music Store of Apple.

[...]

And a Microsoft executive told reporters yesterday that a Zune phone was part of the company’s plan for the product line.

As anticipated in last week's column, Apple's special event came and went this Tuesday and with the exception of the two HDTV models I predicted, it went the way I said it would. And those big screens are likely still coming before the Christmas season, just as Apple launched three new iMacs last week without putting Steve Jobs onstage.

But now let's put this week's Apple event in some context and understand what it is and isn't, because there is a lot happening here. It generally comes down to a word we used to use all the time but haven't much since the Internet crash of 2001 -- disintermediation.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Zune is out -- see this page for a press release/fact sheet index and pictures. Pricing and release date (other than "... this holiday season in the United States") tbd.

Anybody want to buy a used Creative Zen?...

Marking the next big milestone for its Connected Entertainment vision, Microsoft Corp. today unveiled details of the first products to be released under its Zune™ brand. Designed around the principles of sharing, discovery and community, Zune will create new ways for consumers to connect and share entertainment experiences. The Zune experience centers around connection — connection to your library, connection to friends, connection to community and connection to other devices.

“The digital music entertainment revolution is just beginning,” said J Allard, vice president, design and development, at Microsoft, who is leading the charge for building the family of Zune products. “With Zune, we are not simply delivering a portable device, we are introducing a new platform that helps bring artists closer to their audiences and helps people find new music and develop new social connections.”

Timely reality check. There's a subtle dimension to the "Steve Jobs 2.0 = Bill Gates 1.0" themes in this and other recent articles, however -- Microsoft isn't currently doing the "... closed ecosystems built on proprietary, locked-down technologies" model in these contexts, while Apple is.

The online video and tv market is wide open right now. Will Apple's iPod/iTunes strategy work as well for movies/tv shows as it did for music? If I was a betting man, I'd give that a resounding NO. There are too many other players - and none of them are as ill-informed and ignorant of the Internet as mainstream music companies were/are. Plus of course Microsoft missed the boat with online music (Zune is a very belated attempt at catch-up), but they won't make the same mistake with video/tv.

It'll be interesting to review the next round of quarterly reports from Intuit, Adobe, and others, to see just how much Google is paying for this type of partnership.

Google (GOOG) just upped the ante in its desktop challenge to Microsoft (MSFT) The Web-search leader hammered out a deal to include various Google tools in a new version of Intuit's QuickBooks small-business accounting software. The partnership represents one of Google's most aggressive moves into PC desktop software, the market dominated by Microsoft.

Geez it seems every time I log on these days Adobe Reader is upgrading something and telling me I have to reboot. Is this just me or is it really so freaking hard to get 7.0.8 that it requires rebooting a zillion times?

It takes Nasa 15,000 engineers to keep the shuttle running, for instance, at an annual cost of around $5 billion. That’s one reason the design for Orion is a return to the old model of a space rocket, with a capsule on the end of a giant stack of boosters. Everything about the shuttle is horribly out of fashion, so much so that it’s hard to remember that it was once seen as an engineering wonder. But then, after the crash of first Challenger and then Columbia, and the rising costs and the general sense that it wasn’t doing anything useful, and the related doubts over the International Space Station, whose own costs escalated from $8 billion to $100 billion, the shuttle became an official, all-round flop. And the main reason for that was and is the two terrible crashes.

Models touted Wednesday are an inch thick and boast backlit keys for ease of use in a darkened room; a button that launches Windows Media Center for movies, music and other content; media controls; and a wireless connection that works from 30 feet away.

"The Commission understands Microsoft's desire to make Vista more secure than its predecessors," an EC spokesperson said this week. "[The innovation that comes from a variety of security companies] could be at risk if Microsoft was allowed to foreclose the existing competition in security software markets. Less diversity and innovation would ultimately harm consumers through reduced choice and higher security risks."

In its quest to catch up to iPod, however, Microsoft has hired an army of musical savants. Like Winn, many on the Zune team come from recording labels, radio stations, or other music companies. They include KEXP DJ Kyle "Kid Hops" Hopkins and Chris Stephenson, another British expat who worked as an MTV vice president in Europe and as marketing head for House of Blues, the L.A.-based chain of clubs and concert spaces.

The visionary behind Zune, however, is a native Microsoftie—J. Allard—probably the one man at the company whose hipster credentials are unassailable.

Read the full article for more on Allard and his role (in Zune, Xbox, and other stuff).

Lots of Microsoft hardware press releases yesterday -- see this page for an index and pictures.

With laptop sales up 37 percent1 in 2005 and more than 30 million U.S. households expected to use VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) by 20092, consumers are demanding new solutions for richer communications experiences, even when they are on the go. Microsoft Hardware meets these needs with its expanded digital communications line, which consists of the Microsoft® LifeCam NX-6000 (the company’s first webcam designed exclusively for laptop use), the LifeCam VX-1000, and two new digital headsets — LifeChat™ ZX-6000 and LifeChat LX-3000 — all optimized for use with Windows Live™ Messenger, the world’s largest instant messaging network,3 providing a simple and natural communications experience.

Verizon Communications Inc. is taking more of its television technology development into its own hands and relying less on its close partner Microsoft Corp. as the phone company struggles to leapfrog cable in an urgent battle to add TV service to its traditional offerings.

But, later in the article:

Christine Heckart, a Microsoft general manager, defended the company's work for Verizon, noting that her company's software is now running everywhere Verizon's service has been introduced. Microsoft executives say that any difficulties that may have occurred in developing the Verizon boxes weren't out of the ordinary for a project of this sort. They also say the plan from the outset had been for Microsoft to reduce its staff devoted to the project while Verizon would be increasing its own.

Ultimately I think this is more about Microsoft's relationships with Cisco and Motorola, as they're the dominant set-top box companies (via their Scientific-Atlanta and General Instrument acquisitions, respectively), at least in North America.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

See the post for more on "the increasing similarity in Bill Gates 1.0 and Steve Jobs 2.0"

The iTV streaming box announcement to me was a Gatesian moment. The device is still in “beta” and is not going to be available for another few months, perhaps longer. Add to this the harsh truth that Steve could only get Disney (like they have a choice) to commit to the iTunes Movie Store; what you see is a Microsoft type strategy of chilling the market with a yet unfinished product, and get everyone scared shitless. The Barons of Redmond used to do it so well, before their empire started resembling the Roman conquests.

Apple Computer Chief Executive Steve Jobs made a few out-of-character moves as he unveiled a slate of new products on Sept. 12. For starters, he left the trademark black mock turtleneck at home, instead donning a black button-down. The real shocker, though, was Apple's decision to tout a product months before it's due to hit the market.

So what does this mean to video on the net for everyone else ? For movies, nothing. Nada. Downloading wont get any faster. DRM is still a nightmare. High Definition video from the net is still a nightmare. In fact, the best way to beat Apple in this game is for cable and satellite companies to push as much content as possible to HD. The greater the expectation for HD content from consumers, the less value to consumers for downloading movies. For TV shows, its still a great idea. Selling TV shows is found money for Apple and producer.

One problem with this: Apple wants people to pay (Apple) for the privilege of watching content they can often get at zero marginal cost from their TV service providers.

The boldest thing about this is that it really signals that Apple isn't going to bother competing with TiVo and Media Center and all the other DVRs -- it's basically going to bet that the whole programming grid is over, and people are just going to download the shows they want to watch directly. They're going to do to TV programming what the iTunes store did to CD packaging. As long as they can figure out how to get HD-quality video into the store, I'm ready to switch today...

I think this is ridiculous -- Microsoft improves security in Vista, inevitably disrupting existing 3rd-party security products designed for Windows XP, and the improvements are considered anti-competitive? Maybe they should also force automobile manufacturers to offer cars without those aftermarket-dirsupting built-in security features (such as seat belts and air bags).

The competition regulator for the European Union clashed with Microsoft again on Tuesday, this time over security upgrades in the company’s new Windows Vista operating system.

The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, warned Microsoft against foreclosing competition in computer security by tying new security features into its new product, which is expected to go on sale soon, saying that could harm consumers.

Apple cited market research yesterday showing that it's now the fifth largest retailer of music in the U.S., after Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp., Best Buy Co. and Amazon.com Inc. The iPod accounted for more than a third of the company's revenue in its most recent quarter and demand for new video products could help strengthen that business further, analysts say.

Apple said users will attach iTV -- a flat, square device that resembles Apple's Mac mini computer -- directly to their television sets and home theater systems through audio-video cables. The device will access audio and video files stored on a user's Mac or PC through a common wireless home-networking technology called Wi-Fi. Users will be able to navigate their movie and music libraries as they are displayed on a television set using an infrared remote control that connects to iTV.

So it's probably a Mac mini for $299, with assorted governors built in...

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

At a media event Tuesday, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs also showed off a compact gadget, dubbed iTV, that will allow consumers to wirelessly send movies purchased online -- as well as other digital content stored on a computer -- to a television set. It will sell for $299 and be available early next year.

Parse this -- "Apple announced its intentions to..." -- what would the press say if Microsoft did the same thing? The reality distortion field remains intact...

"The big theme today was, Apple announced its intentions to take over your living room," said Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray.

Apple would not say which flavor of 802.11 wireless networking the iTV would use. "We're not talking about the technology inside iTV," Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller said in an interview. "That's next year's discussion."

Wetpaint -- the build-your-own wiki site -- said today that consumers have used the 3-month-old service to create more than 30,000 wikis. The Seattle company, which I profiled in March, also said that users can now add YouTube videos to their wikis.

The frequency of Steve Perlman quotes in this context (see the article for an example) leads me to suspect Perlman's latest start-up may have a role in this somewhere... Perlman was a key innovator at Apple, then General Magic, Catapault, WebTV, Microsoft, and Moxi (the latter is now part of a Paul Allen company; small world)...

Flickr has added support for the new version of Blogger in beta! Now you can blog and post photos directly from Flickr to your beta blog. This is something that a ton of you have been requesting, and many thanks go to the Flickr folks for upgrading their site to work with the new version of Blogger.

Free insurance coverage for identity theft and computer damage is among the premium security offerings AOL is making available to its dwindling base of paying subscribers.

The move, which AOL said it would announce to its members today, follows last month's decision to give away AOL.com e-mail accounts, software and other features once reserved for paying subscribers and remove key reasons for millions of customers to keep paid accounts.

Gamers, as fanatical as they are about their craft, have only so much money to spend and their pockets may well be empty by the time the high-priced PS3 becomes available in March-April. No doubt, the first batch of PS3 consoles will go out door quickly but it's the subsequent sales that matter.Looking at it things from a high definition video player perspective, HD DVD already had a huge price advantage over Sony's Blu-ray. The PS3 was going to be a way to narrow the gap. However, that is not going to happen for at least six months now. Meanwhile, in addition to the relatively cheap HD DVD players already on the market, Microsoft will bring out a US$200 plug-in box for the millions of Xbox 360 consoles.In addition, Toshiba just yesterday announced a new three-layer disc technology that will enable HD DVD discs to play on ordinary DVD players.

Adobe is set to announce Wednesday that it is launching a photo-sharing Web site in about three weeks. Photoshop Showcase will work with the next versions of Adobe's consumer-targeted photo and video editing software--Photoshop Elements 5.0 and Premiere Elements 5.0--which will both be released alongside Showcase.

A breakout new-media company here is changing the art of storytelling through the convergence of computing, graphic design, audio, video, text and the Internet. How it invents techniques to use these platforms, and who it recruits to do that work is a journey that large media companies should watch.

Facebook, the popular social networking Web site that has mainly focused on college students, is preparing to open its membership to everyone.

The move is meant to help the site expand, but it risks undercutting one of its attractions: it has been more exclusive and somewhat more protected than MySpace, its larger and more freewheeling rival.

An updated edition of the venerable game, scheduled to be introduced on Thursday, will include tokens that are styled after name-brand products. Five of the eight tokens in the new Monopoly Here and Now edition will be branded, offering game players the chance to be represented by miniature versions of a Toyota Prius hybrid car, an order of McDonald’s French fries, a New Balance running shoe, a cup of Starbucks coffee or a Motorola Razr cellphone.

Zuckerberg told The Associated Press on Thursday that Facebook was working on giving users additional privacy options. The safeguards let users block from feeds entire categories -- such as changes to the groups they belong to -- while still allowing people to observe such changes by visiting the profile page.

The options were started Friday and essentially let users block all types of feeds if they want. Zuckerberg said Friday such options should have been offered from the start.

''This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it,'' he wrote users. ''But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls.''

Monday, September 11, 2006

Two key reasons why Microsoft is proactively working with PC makers on new designs:

More than 80 percent of the revenue Microsoft generates from Windows sales comes from computer manufacturers who pre-install versions of the operating system on machines they sell. That sales channel was worth at least $10.5 billion to the company in the last fiscal year, according to Microsoft's most recent annual report.

[...]

"Apple Computer has shown that if you control the software and you control the hardware, you can make the two fit harmoniously into a beautiful, elegant package," said Don Norman, a former Apple executive who now consults with Microsoft and wrote the 2004 book "Emotional Design: Why We Love (or hate) Everyday Things."

See the article for more details (inlcuding some reasons Don Norman thinks Apple went too far).

See the article for speculation about what Apple may introduce tomorrow.

Meanwhile, in the Amazon Unbox context, I'm assuming Amazon and Microsoft opted to optimize for Windows XP Media Center Edition and Vista PCs; either would make streaming video much simpler.

According to Steve Perlman, a former Apple engineer who founded Moxi Digital in 1999 in an effort to create an integrated set-top box for the living room: “The ‘last mile’ problem of delivering broadband to the home has largely been solved. What remains is the ‘last hundred feet’ problem.” By that, he meant reliably delivering high-definition video to television sets using Internet-based technology.

“Once that has been solved,” he said, “it will completely transform the entertainment landscape.”

Read the full article for a timely reality check, including guidance on how to be socially safe...

To join the club, you answer a few questions, upload a photo or two, and voilá, you've got a MySpace profile. Although the site started out as a place for musicians and artists to connect with one another, it has gradually morphed into an online hot spot, and its popularity now easily dwarfs that of others of its kind. The site currently has more than 100 million profiles, with 230,000 new members signing up every day. In August, MySpace accounted for 81 percent of visitors to leading social-networking sites, according to Hitwise, a market-research company. Facebook, a site that's popular with college students, came in a distant second, receiving just 7.3 percent of social-networking traffic.

Researchers in Britain and Europe are looking at technology that would see a comprehensive network of microphones and cameras installed throughout the aircraft, including the lavatory, which would be linked to a computer.

This computer would be "trained" to pick up suspicious behaviour, said Catherine Neary, of Bae Systems, one of the British participants in a £24 million European Union project Safety of Aircraft in Future European Environment.

No wonder people are looking for something better. After years of lackluster sales, specialized ``media center" PCs are beginning to catch on with consumers. These machines let users record cable or satellite TV shows for later viewing, and create an index of recorded music and video files. Users can even punch up their favorite tunes and movies with a remote control device like those used for a standard television or stereo.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Read the article for details on how Facebook has responded to user protests etc.

That threshold was reached, unexpectedly, earlier this week when the social networking site Facebook unveiled what was to be its killer app. In the past, to keep up with the doings of friends, Facebook members had to make some sort of effort — by visiting the friend’s Web page from time to time, or actually sending an e-mail or instant message to ask how things were going.

Facebook’s new feature, a news “feed,” does that heavy lifting for you. The program monitors the activity on its members’ pages — a change in one’s relationship status, the addition of a new person to one’s friends list, the listing of a new favorite song or interest — and sends that information to everyone in your circle in a constantly updating news ticker. Imagine a device that monitors the social marketplace the way a blinking Bloomberg terminal tracks incremental changes in the bond market and you’ll get the idea.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Unbox does do iTunes one better by allowing up to 5 PCs to watch purchased videos. Portable Media Players are supported by means of an extra file included in all purchases, which is a specially encoded version of the video that the Unbox software can transfer to supported players like the Creative Zen Vision:M. Because the software is Windows only and the videos are all .wmv format, iPods are out of the question, another serious downside.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Who can resist a chance to surf the Web with a beta version of something like Firefox, running on a beta version of Microsoft's next operating system, using a beta version of Apple's Boot Camp software? Not I.

From the final page of the article:

Still, I can say at least this much about Vista: I've had fun using it so far. Yes, Vista is still a work in progress and there are some annoyances that go hand-in-hand with running Windows -- the User Account Control window, for instance, pops up a lot. Why do I have to give an admin OK anytime I want to change the time and date? And what's with the plethora of control panels? By my count, there are 49! But so far there have been no show-stoppers. To paraphrase the praise usually reserved for Apple's Mac OS X, it just works. And on Apple hardware, it just works exceptionally well.

More from the expanding embarrassment of riches in the communication/collaboration zone. Interesting comments as well. (Note: it's not a Microsoft Live offering.)

This is a powerful application that addresses one of the primary benefit of wikis and online Word clones like Zoho Writer and Writely - collaboration via the Internet. The functionality from the user perspective is very similar to Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server, which allows business users to collaborate on documents via a centralized Windows server. Unlike Sharepoint, Live Documents doesn’t store any documents on a server, and therefore doesn’t require you to have your own (very expensive) Windows server.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has famously called high schools "obsolete" and warned about their effect on U.S. competitiveness. Now, his company has a chance to prove that it can help fix the woes of public education.

After three years of planning, the Microsoft Corp.-designed "School of the Future" opened its doors Thursday, a gleaming white modern facility looking out of place amid rows of ramshackle homes in a working-class West Philadelphia neighborhood.

Read the full article for details on how to join "The Coalition to Stop Facebook, Stalker Edition."

By late on Wednesday, more than 500,000 of Facebook's 9.5 million members had signed an online petition calling for the company to back off a feature called "News Feed" that instantly notifies members when friends update their own sites.